She stares out at the unforgiving landscape. Almost all blue-velvet summer sky, the moon-like desert a mere strip along the bottom.
How could he?
But has he?
Something in her doesn’t believe this. That he could, that he would …
She folds the phone back into a small and sad pebble. She’s got to get on. Lucy will notice soon. While she walks, she can think.
She was the sensible one, Damien the reckless. If she had done what he’d recommended, their daughter would be dead. Simone knows it the way she knows she is in Texas, that the sun is shining, that the sky is blue.
But Simone also knows Damien.
He hasn’t done it. That is the thought that underpins this. He – so reasonable, so considered – would not spill his heart out to the media.
Something else is going on. She looks up at that blue sky. She knows it.
The rest of the articles blur together. Her staff being stopped by journalists outside Dishes. Timeo looking tired, dishevelled, holding a hand up to his face to avoid photographs on smartphones. Somebody called Josephine from Lucy’s camp speaking out, saying she was ‘a nice girl, but thought the rules didn’t apply to her.’
Lucy stops up ahead and looks around for Simone.
‘How dehydrated, on a scale of clear wee to a small brown cube of piss?’ she calls.
‘About a six,’ Simone says, putting the phone away. Lucy doesn’t need to know about any of this.
‘Not bad,’ Lucy replies, her voice high and cheerful, and Simone can’t bear to crush it, her spirit.
Simone has hardy feet from the last few years in kitchens that never hurt, but they are now sore and aching in her battered trainers. Lucy’s back is red raw, even with suncream, and she has pulled out her cardigan and put it around her shoulders despite it being forty degrees. Since adding the layer, she’s drinking even more.
All they do is walk, not speaking. Lucy drinks gallons, sometimes pouring a little over her chest. Simone drinks nothing.
An hour later, she turns the phone on, and there is internet signal once more. Simone has had time to think, and, this time, she walks and types in the restaurant’s Instagram handle. Only she and Damien have the login.
A pinned post readsSTILL OPEN FOR BUSINESS, which is damning in itself but, after that, something else. Anew photo, a fish, not unusual – they are always showcasing dishes – but it’s not on their menu, and neither is it displayed on Dishes’ crockery. Simone tilts her head this way and that, trying to work it out in the glare of the sun. It’s a fish still with the head on, something like sour cream dotted in four blobs around it. They don’t serve it, and she doesn’t know which fish it is. It’s kippered to a deep red. It looks more like an image that’s been downloaded than created by Dishes.
Simone checks the restaurant’s inbox. It’s full of people tagging it in their posts, speculating about the owners, the news stories. Damien has set up an auto-reply, which Simone winces at.We’re getting a lot of traffic at the moment to this site. If you’d like to book a table please call …
Halfway down the message inbox the restaurant has messaged itself the post of the fish. It’s the only message between Dishes and itself, a strange tautology. She stares at it, but then Lucy interrupts her, and she closes it down once more.
Late afternoon, and they’re hungry. Simone doesn’t want to stop to cook again, but Lucy forces the issue at what must be four o’clock.
Simone makes them sandwiches but they continue.
Into the evening, and at first Simone thought it was her imagination that the walk was easier. She dismissed it as a kind of delirium, but, after a while, she asks Lucy.
‘I think it does go downhill because of the Rio Grande,’ she replies. ‘That runs along the entire bottom of Big Bend. It forms the border with Mexico.’
Simone nods. Relief floods her system. Lower ground might mean water, and water might mean time.
Sure enough, around eight o’clock, a small groove in the land becomes a tiny, wet tributary, then widens to a stream, then even broader. Simone gladly fills their bottles up with it,doesn’t even think to complain about the extra weight. The water runs down the back of her throat. It’s warm, but it’s glassy and satisfying, too.
‘We could find a softer spot, I think, for tonight. Then we should hit Terlingua tomorrow afternoon or evening,’ Lucy replies.
Simone can’t help but notice some simplicity here: the surety that tomorrow will come, that they are not on borrowed time.
They find a patch of grass right by the stream as the sun sinks. Lucy begins to put the tent up while they still have some light, and Simone pats the ground. It’s slightly damp, its surface spongy, and it reminds Simone of England so suddenly and so ferociously that she has to turn away from Lucy as she unrolls a sleeping bag.
She thinks of that one time early on in her schooling with Timeo when she thought it looked so green and so verdant outside on the school run in May that she went home and made a warm green bean salad, a kind of foodie pathetic fallacy. They’d eaten it in the garden, under the awning, watching the drizzle glisten the plants and scent the lawn. It had been the very beginning of summer, where the weather might still be cold but has promise. Later, she’d told Timeo, and he’d said, ‘I’m afraid you are a cook now.’ They’d added the green bean salad to the menu that spring, and Simone is pretty sure theMichelin Guideinspector the following February ordered it. Her humble salad, pulled from her mind by something she had never before associated with food: creativity.
